I’m looking into ways to improve how people search in Firefox. My previous contributions focused on getting useful pages to show up in the AwesomeBar when searching history, and I collected plenty of useful feedback to see what users wanted or didn’t want in the results.

I’ve written a restartless add-on that lets you see how you use the searchbar in Firefox. It scans through what you’ve previously typed into the searchbar and groups your searches by the words you’ve typed. The first set of results shows words that you frequently use across different searches, and the second set shows searches that you repeat multiple times.

If you’re running a recent Firefox 4 beta [mozilla.com], install the add-on, and it’ll open a new tab with your results (without sending that data anywhere). This is a restartless add-on that will also uninstall itself after it runs.

If you feel like sharing your results, please leave a comment or send me an email: edilee@gmail.com.

Unique and repeated search queries from my own searchbar history data

From my personal usage, the unique search queries set has many searches that I only do once to find out information on some topic like “mozilla” or “starcraft”. This contrasts with my repeated searches where I have terms like “time” or “movie”. I do make heavy use of keyword searches and smart bookmarks, but I happen to not have set any for these repeated searches probably because search engines like Google and Bing provide useful information on the results page.

Are your results like mine? Do you have a totally different search behavior? Any suggestions for how you would improve searching?

My only suggestion would be to mash the awesomebar and the search box together. At the moment I’m using the Omnibar addon to do this, but it’d be much nicer if it was a native thing.
It’s silly to have two bars, when you could have one that does it all.

[…] currently looking at. You can use the search bar to find new pages on the internet. As I mentioned last week, I’m taking a look into ways to improve searches in Firefox as part of Mozilla Labs, so this […]

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Ed Lee on Nintendo, Firefox, and more - helping you feel more edilee today.